[Foundation-l] Ideas for newbie recruitment

Fri Nov 4 15:18:03 UTC 2011

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 11:55 PM, Mateus Nobre <mateus.nobre at live.co.uk> wrote:
>
> This hostility is being reflected in the drop at the number of the editors.I agree with the ''automatic-message theory''. None likes automatic messages. In my view, it should be reserved for vandals.
> Newbies needs a special priority. Something like: ''Hi, thanks for your edition! We hope you become part of our team. If you need anything, just talk to us''.
> It's not hard to do, is it?

It's not "hard" as in difficult but it would be "hard" as in laborious
and time consuming.

I went through a phase of attending to my watchlist and whenever I saw
a user-page red-linked and the associated edit was a positive
contribution I went ahead and Twinkled them a user page welcome
notice. I'd welcome tens of people a day this way.

I'm afraid there is little chance of me welcoming tens of users with
even a personalised message I had written myself and could simply copy
and paste. The task would simply be too dull and repetitive for me.
Even with Twinkle it's still boring. If I wanted to bore myself in my
free time I'd take up a job that paid.

If we wish to welcome the huge amounts of newbie editors with a form
of personalisation, I suggest we invest in artificial intelligence. If
nothing else the results would probably be hilarious and bring
unintentional joy wherever it attempted to help, like those sites
devoted to Engrish.

I read a quote recently which ran something like "enjoyment of one's
tools is essential to great work". For the most part I find MediaWiki
very pleasant to use and things have definitely moved in the right
direction since I joined in 2004. But I was familiar with the concept
of mark-up having dabbled with HTML when I began, so I can't really
empathise with the average web user who is immediately baffled by what
they see when they click 'edit' for that first time.

Bodnotbod